The Rainbows of the 716

One of the things that sticks in my memory most strongly from our trip last December to Oahu is the rainbows. Every day, at least one rainbow. It just became this thing I did every morning: Get up, make the coffee, go out to our balcony, look off to the right, and see a rainbow. I even saw my first moonbow there.

Western New York is not nearly so prolific in the rainbow department.

But the other night, our WNY skies put on a show. A series of thunderstorms rolled in from Lake Erie, and in their wake, the sunlight did its thing. It started with the faintest wisp of a rainbow, barely there:

As the evening progressed, the bit of rainbow brightened…

…until finally…

And the rainbows were impressive in their duration, too: this one lingered in the sky for a good, long time. On the second pic above, we were heading home from dinner at a gluten-free restaurant in Lockport, which is way up north, about 30 miles. I took that full rainbow shot from the car in I-990, north of the Amherst UB campus, after about ten miles of driving. (Safety note: I was not driving! The Wife was driving. I was not doing sky-photography while driving.)

Another ten or twelve miles later, as we were approaching downtown Buffalo on I-190, there was this.

That just made me all kinds of happy.

Meanwhile, in the other direction, out over the lake, the sky was doing this:

Obviously nobody is ever going to mistake Buffalo for Waikiki, all right? But the sky here can really put on a show sometimes. And in Buffalo you can see sunset over water.

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